Dear Diary Moment 8/27/2020:
As painful as it has been (mainly due to how low it has gone on –that is when I have other things to do), I feel like this is particular immersion in the Anti-Oedipus has been particularly productive. I feel like I’ve been making breakthroughs. At the same time, I feel like I’m just scratching the surface.
As my fellow Deleuzians have likely noticed (as they seem to be at a point where they’re applying it to more topical matters), I tend to repeat the same things in different ways. I apologize for it. But that is just me trying articulate what is coming at me at a more visceral level. My hope is to come up with a more blue-collarized stepping stone (perhaps even vulgarized as compared to a Buchanan or Holland (for the magazine I’ve been hanging w/ for some time now: Philosophy Now.
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As I get it, desiring production is the means by which everything moves: becomes social production. Desiring machines are the means by which they do so, whether they’re mouths, lips, fingers, fantasies, dreams, words, etc, etc., etc……. … … .
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And can’t we see a kind of overlap here with Lacan’s mirror phase? Given Deleuze and Guatarri’s use of babies as argument for their model of the relationship between the unruly unconscious and the social, it seems to me that the moment the baby first looks into the mirror and begins to see itself as a coherent whole (that is as compared to the chaotic flux it actually is in terms of its desiring production), moves through the 3 syntheses, it begins to form its BwO.
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What I’m reminded of, as concerns the BwO, is a dialectic offered in Arthur Lupia’s Uninformed: Why People Know So Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It. It starts w/ information, moves on to a body of knowledge that we all have, and lands in competence.
What that all implies is unimportant for my purposes here. What I’m mainly interested in is the body of knowledge as it seems like a useful analogy (if not outright candidate (for the Body without Organs. The thing to put in mind here is that the body of knowledge does not just consist of scientific and factual information; it consists of emotional information as well. It’s like this flux of knowledge hanging in the background from which we extract what we know, think, or even feel about the world at any given time.
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At a social level, the most important thing to understand is that we all live in a spectrum between paranoia and schizophrenia.